Despite the desires of the internet, Dev Patel clearly never wanted to be James Bond. He wanted to be Rorschach. Patel’s directorial debut, Monkey Man, fashions its Hanuman-based action hero after the big, brash mythologies of Indian epics and comic book vigilantes. Delicate moralities have their faces smashed against toilet bowl porcelain, and nuance has its bones cracked by a kitchen-sink adoration of grisly action styles. The result is an unwieldy flurry of blows, unleashed by a whirling dervish filmmaker battering us with his influences. It’s a familiar chaos, and one that threatens to get away from the person trying to contain it, but with the extra sauce of a passion project. From John Wick to Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee movies to the Ramayana, Patel poured his fascinations into his frenetic fable. Monkey Man finds itself in the final round, however, landing combo after bloody combo as it ascends towards actually reaching its wild-eyed ambitions.
And those ambitions are shared by Kid (played by Patel), who we meet as a living, breathing Chumbawamba song. He gets knocked down and gets back up again, professionally. When not spitting blood as the fall guy in an underground MMA match (overseen by peacocking ring announcer Sharlto Copley), he’s scraping for stolen dollars with his network of impoverished peers. This is all in service of his ultimate goal: Revenge on the men who destroyed his idyllic rural life and family.
Not an especially original premise, and—as Kid infiltrates the high-end club his cop target (Sikandar Kher) frequents—not an especially original execution. Kid is a being of endless energy and rage, an underdog driven by a baked-in action-movie assurance: If he just beats the hell out of enough people, he’ll have fixed things.
Grounded in Monkey Man’s fictional Indian city of Yatana, it’s a position of desperate anger, exacerbated by its setting, where injustice fills the air and inequality is at its most extreme. Hopping between slums, kitchen-dumpster alleys and black-tie brothels, polarized disparity is as much a target as the crooked powerbrokers the film stands up as its symbols. Monkey Man’s violent disillusion with the corrupt three-way handshake between religion, business and politics (not to mention men in general) coincides with India’s increasing turn to the right. The Bharatiya Janata Party and its highly conservative Hindutva haunt the action film broadly, but specific snippets of news footage interspersed make sure that nobody can miss its real-life ties.
This overt thematic thrust may compensate for the utter lack of depth boasted by most action movies, but in Monkey Man it contributes to a wobbly first half. The pacing hitches, hitting its expository flashbacks too hard and lingering too long with places and characters that never amount to much. We understand Yatana, and Kid’s place in it, immediately. The blistering editing, the dense locations, the bold colors and lights all set up the grim-yet-heightened tone that eventually takes over completely. But before that, we have a stumbling introduction to the club Kid wants to take down, along with characters whose dialogue (thanks to a sound mix that could use a little fine-tuning) can fly right by you. I’m all for Pitobash’s bawdy comic relief and a small side quest to an underground gun dealer, but for a little while, Monkey Man feels entirely cobbled together from these smaller, disparate moments.
But then Kid screws up. The underdog gets put down for what seems like the last time. And then Monkey Man finds its mojo. Kid finds refuge in a temple run by hijras, graceful and charismatic, guided by Vipin Sharma’s knowing leader. Here, the barrier between the film’s realistic rat race (which would make anyone snap) and the more mystic cultural scaffolding underneath (which provides hope that one person’s snapping could actually do something) finally dissolves away. Taking notes from Rocky, Indian classical music and the temple training of Jackie Chan films, Monkey Man embraces the violent death-and-rebirth ethos of the temple to create one of the best training montages since Creed.
A heavy-bag boxing sequence, edited with a satisfying crispness so that Patel’s blows match the slaps of the tabla drumheads, is the best sequence in the film. Here, we finally see Patel’s vision click. His influences spark with something new; acting, writing, directing all combine as this sensory orchestra is conducted first by his mind, then by his own muscular body. His performance is magnetic and visceral throughout, but the quieter moments of control double-underline his graceful movements. The visual rhythm, balanced by the training’s tangible physicality and the drum’s near-infinite crescendo, is a barnburner. As the movie careens headfirst towards its brutal bull-rush of a final tower climb, you’re as amped as Kid.
After Monkey Man’s array of interests begin working together, the nods to mythology begin to pay off. The story and setting, now comfortable operating less like something that needs to live entirely in our world and can have the operatic acts of a modern legend, lean fully into the otherworldly. Those familiar with Hindu fables will find all the more to love as Kid literally tears himself asunder (in an homage to Hanuman) and builds himself back up. They will grimace yet retain their confidence when Kid willingly drinks poison. To everyone else, these moments will all build out a novel myth of Patel’s action hero—a man driven to the self-destructive brink with only one viable outlet for his emotional turmoil. As he heads out on his righteous warpath, the horrible destruction that comes with this rebirth is felt with every blow.
The early fights are a frenetic collision of frantic close-ups, slowly clarifying into more visible, longer-take sequences of combat as Kid becomes a better brawler. Cinematographer Sharone Meir allows Patel to follow his whims—shots encompass everything from a camera operator doing fight choreography just to keep up during some cramped kitchen combat to a camera swinging over a Diwali crowd, seemingly dropped from the air and immersed in the mass of celebrants. You get the sense that Patel wanted every shot to be as done as boldly as possible within their means, and that Meir figured out each new twist. This maximalist overload can contribute to the chaotic feel of the film, but it also gives the exciting and optimistic sense that someone is figuring out their style right in front of you—especially when it comes to the later fight scenes.
Though its best action sequences owe much to the John Wick school of thought (itself continuing on John Woo’s tradition), where legibility of motion is prioritized and established through longer bouts of uncut, clear choreography, Monkey Man nudges its fights towards the nastier side of Asian bonecrunchers, like Iko Uwais’ The Raid or The Night Comes for Us. While we get a taste of it all—knife fights, gun fights, fist fights, car chases, foot races, backstabbings, frontstabbings—the focus is on scrappy close combat. Anything goes. You know the details they list when the referee says he wants a good, clean fight? No biting, nothing below the belt, that kind of thing? Monkey Man wants the opposite, and it’s a thrill to see such tangible, gruesome cheap shots and one-step-further barbarity actualized on screen. It tickles the lizard brain, sure, but it also reflects character. There are nose-chompings, throat-cuttings, weaponized fireworks, Trainspotting toilets and so much more—and it all feels like a broken man’s last resort.
The dripping-wet violence and exertion of Monkey Man make you feel like you’re watching someone tear a film from their flesh. Hearing the brutal stories from the movie’s production, that feeling acquires a layer of awe. Patel establishes himself as a filmmaker with bountiful style and dedication, and as someone whose work transforms and personalizes his influences. But with that excruciating artistic surgical procedure comes mess. With first-time filmmakers, mess is a guarantee. But despite making a film that lives between worlds—walking its litter-strewn asphalt as easily as its lush hallucinated jungles—and that often feels at war with itself, Patel has earnestly straddled the highest myth and the grittiest realism to make a raw, exciting combination that feels all his own. Monkey Man is the kind of action movie I want to see more of, and it gives Patel the chance to turn himself into the kind of action star he wants to see.
Director: Dev Patel
Writer: Dev Patel, Paul Angunawela, John Collee
Starring: Dev Patel, Sharlto Copley, Pitobash, Sobhita Dhulipala, Sikandar Kher, Vipin Sharma, Ashwini Kalsekar, Adithi Kalkunte, Makarand Deshpande
Release Date: March 11, 2024 (SXSW)
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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